You should have been expelled

In more RIAA fantasy land, powered by the US Congress thinks that colleges are not doing enough to step the “Rampant Tide of Theft” from American colleges. Peer to Peer networks are just plain evil, Bittorrent is a work of Satan, and in other words, everything is to blame but the system itself.

Although RIAA is on the defense lately after they have started loosing cases, or better yet dropping them, the whole system has to be put in context. The backlash against the recording industry, with slowing sales, (remember they have sued nearly 20,000 people since they went on this mission), and artists that are increasingly irrelevant in the world.

The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions — “Does your institution expel violating students?” — shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become. Source: Washington Post

Back to congress though, nothing wrong with a fact finding mission, but with the question shown in the Washington post article above shows just how out of touch the process can be.

It is difficult to stop Peer-to-Peer traffic, it is survivable, it is old enough now that it is easy to proxy, it is easy to make anonymous, it is easy to use jump points across the network to hide track, and campus networks are notoriously open all the time. They work under a different concept than a business, the idea of a campus network is to share data, not keep it in.

Given that difference, stopping peer traffic is going to be impossible unless the philosophy that guides campus networks change.

Now smart colleges have bought services that students can use that give them access to full music libraries. Although no one has said if peer traffic goes down when students have an affordable alternative. Now that would have been a question worthy of congress to ask.